We have just published in “Nature Communications” new results that may contribute to our understanding of the working mechanism of our compound Bedaquiline (TMC207/R207910) against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. We have especially investigated why it takes more time for the compound to kill the bacteria ("[...] early bactericidal activity during the first week of chemotherapy is minimal").

Identifying such early bactericidal activity has been used for many decades in the clinic as an indicator for the efficacy of a new compound. Accordingly, if the early effects are low, this has been seen as a disadvantage for the further development of a compound. An obvious reason is that clinical trials need to last longer to proof efficacy - which is of course more expensive.

Our data suggests that as a consequence of treatment with Bedaquiline - which inhibits the ATPsynthase of the TB bacteria and thereby reduces the available energy supply - the bacteria adjust aspects of their metabolism in an attempt to survive the energy shortage. Furthermore, using Affymetrix microarrays we show data that suggest an induction of the dormancy regulon. These findings may provide us with a hypothesis how the bacteria can survive the initial phase of drug exposure.

I still very much enjoy the robustness and simplicity of BarracudaDrive. I have been using the software for my website for many years now and porting my data from my home-based NSLU2 server to a VPS server was surprisingly simple.

Still, I continue to keep an eye open for new developments. A few days ago I started working with Svbtle. It is an interesting approach to blogging and I very much like the simplicity. Furthermore, it uses Markdown syntax - something I use at work via OpenAtrium and personally via the small & very useful Android Wiki App Ema (unfortunately, further developments of the app seem to have stopped).

While I was busy writing a blog post on a new publication that will shortly appear in Nature Communications linked to more experimental data on how our compound Bedaquiline against Mycobacterium tuberculosis works mechanistically, I managed to invoke an error at Svtble. The message made me smile. It reminded me how difficult it still is to come up with error messages that actually help the user...